Everyone’s An Owner
Last Friday we said goodbye to 159 colleagues as part of our alignment offer. It was a tough day, there are a lot of close relationships within Automattic, and goodbyes are always hard.
On Monday, I got to be Oprah for a few minutes. We had scheduled a town hall for leaders around the company to speak to everyone, and our Woo team had ~350 people in person at a meetup in Tulum. I had five minutes to talk, and over the weekend, I had been brainstorming with finance and HR for something nice we could do for everyone who stayed. We couldn’t give them all a six-month bonus, which would have cost ~$126M, but we did take how much we spent on severance for the 159 people, rounded up a bit, and granted everyone at Automattic 200 shares of A12 stock, so about a $12M bonus for the employees.
What’s A12 stock? This is probably the first time you’re hearing about it, we haven’t had a chance to talk about this publicly much before.
